Post-election round-up: 6 things we learnt from 5 May’s elections
Now that the dust has settled from the various elections across the UK on the 5th May, Joe Lo looks at 6 key things to take away from the results.
- The ‘Corbyn effect’ cost English Greens seats in our student-city strongholds
In the places where the Greens did best in the pre-Corbyn era, we are now doing less well. In Bristol, Norwich, Oxford and Cambridge, the Greens either lost or failed to gain councillors. This makes sense and was, to a certain extent, inevitable. The kind of people who voted Green when Ed Milliband was Labour leader are the same kind of people who are likely to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. While the kind of Labour councillors they are asked to vote for may not have changed, people see a vote for Corbyn’s Labour as a vote of confidence in Corbyn’s leadership.
So what to do about this? Rupert Read has argued in The Ecologist that the Green Party should move towards the so-called ‘centre-ground’ of British politics and abandon our socialist values, so that we can be different to Corbyn’s Labour.
Such a strategy would be a disaster. It’s taken decades to build up a reputation as a party of the left. To abandon our left-wing values as soon as it becomes politically useful (in the short-term) to do so, would wreck our electoral fortunes for a generation. While Jeremy Corbyn is leader, the Green Party should show solidarity with him and work with him where possible. If he is deposed by the party’s right, Labour voters and activists will flock (back) to the Greens. If he makes it to the next general election, that election will be a once-in-a-generation chance to elect a decent prime minister and the Greens will not be forgiven if we stand in the way of that.
In the short term, we should stick to our guns and fight local elections on local issues, pointing out that Labour’s councillors do not always share the views of their national leader. In mayoral elections (in Labour cities like Bristol, Liverpool and London), where the candidate is more distinct from the party, the Greens performed well.
- English Greens took seats from Tories
In traditional Tory areas of the West Midlands like Worcester and Solihull, the Greens took council seats off Tories. In Tory Dorset, we got our first seat on Weymouth and Portland borough council and there were gains in areas of Stroud, Gloucestershire, which are not traditionally Green. So outside of the big cities and away from our traditional student voters, the Greens had a good night in terms of council elections.
- The Greens are London’s third party
Thanks to an excellent campaign by Sian Berry and her team, the Greens kept their two assembly members and beat the Lib Dems and UKIP into third in the Mayoral election for the second time in a row. A lot of the credit for this can go down to a good campaign and candidate. Reading the Evening Standard (the London commuter’s bible), Berry was mentioned far more, and in better terms, than either the Lib Dems or UKIP. When she performed in hustings, even journalists you’d expect to be hostile seemed impressed by her. According to the Independent, she also received more second preference votes than any other candidate, showing that a lot of Londoners (many of them Labour voters) liked her but not quite enough to vote for her. If the party can turn that goodwill into solid votes, there could be a lot more Green London councillors in the future.
- The Greens did well in Scotland
The factors and forces spoken about above seem to have almost no bearing on the Greens’ performance in Scotland. It’s (literally) a different party, a different political context, different results. The Scottish Greens gained four MSPs and the balance of power in the Scottish Parliament, which Ric Lander wrote more about here.
- …and in Northern Ireland
The politics of Northern Ireland are even more unique and Bright Green’s correspondent in the region Bradley Allsop has written about a good election night there with the Greens increasing their representation on the national assembly from one to two and increasing their overall vote share.
- Results in Wales were disappointing
With the Greens going for two seats on the Welsh Assembly, we ended up with none. Depressingly, UKIP increased its share of the vote while Labour and Plaid Cymru battled for control of the Assembly. Professor Roger Scully of Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre told Wales Online: “I think the Greens in particular, having had a reasonable prominence in the debates, still had a pretty dreadful result in the end, [and] will need to do some pretty serious thinking about [how] if they are going to be at all serious about Assembly elections in the future and about trying to get somewhere then that might lead them to looking at potentially making some deals.” He said that, if an electoral pact with Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems, had resulted in those parties stepping aside in Mid and West Wales, where Welsh Green Party leader Alice Hooker-Stroud was standing, she might have won.
England and Wales GP didn’t run ‘local election’ campaigns – they ran EU referendum campaigns – big mistake. Well done to the Scots and NI Greens for great campaigns.
In Wales there is a green party – an anti austerity party – that is Plaid Cymru. Prof Roger Scully was spot on, a dreadful result for the green party. The green party in Wales continues to be run by incompetents who yet again will fail to do any serious thinking to identify their failings.
“If he makes it to the next general election, that election will be a once-in-a-generation chance to elect a decent prime minister and the Greens will not be forgiven if we stand in the way of that.”
So we should make it clear that we are nothing like Corbyn’s Labour, otherwise we might steal votes from him?
Confused.
More just-so stories from Bright Green. No evidence or analysis, just fitting results to the same old narrative.
The author again reduces the debate about our political direction to an unhelpful and misleading dichotomy between left and centre ground. Read’s article was not advocating a soggy centre ground agenda, nor an abandonment of our values. I don’t agree with all of what he proposed, but it’s nothing like what is suggested in this article.
Given that in 2015 most of our growth in votes came at the expense of the Lib Dems, it’s worth considering whether being a socialist/left-wing/anti-austerity party was really the cause of our relative success.
You might ask why we did well in London (a very left-leaning, young, cosmpolitan and diverse city) despite the Corbyn effect, bucking the trend that affected other cities.
Why, too, did we do reasonably well in Scotland, despite the SNP and the tacking-left Labour party squeezing the political space?
Why did Wales do so much worse than Scotland, despite some good candidates that have been praised often on this web site?
Maybe this all has far more to do with organisational capacity, the nuance of political strategy and local factors than tired arguments about whether we’re a radical left-wing party?
Re Wales and Scotland, I think the reasons are social environment, system and competition.
Re social environment, Cardiff hasn’t got a green-friendly milieu of the size of Glasgow and especially Edinburgh.
Re electoral system, in 2011 we had 5.2% in South Wales Central. 5.2% was enough to win a seat in North East Scotland in 2003, but will never be enough in Wales.
Re competition, I think your wrong about the supposed left squeeze in Scotland. Both Plaid and Llafur have much stronger progressive reputation than the SNP and SLP. (In the latter’s case mainly because few believe anything they say.)
And I would also say that in Wales we haven’t got the candidates like in Scotland. I don’t mean this as criticism but one has to acknowledge that Patrick has proper star factor (as has Boris Johnson, though luckily that’s where the comparison ends).
It would be interesting to know how many students were actually registered to vote in our “student city strongholds”. I represent the area in Huddersfiled with all the Student Halls and their numbers have decreased dramatically following the introduction of Individual Voter Registration. I know we talk about the ‘Corbyn effect’ but that rather assumes the intention of voting Labour was about Corbyn and what he represents. I didn’t come across that much on the doorstep among Labour voters. The average Labour voter in the ward I represent tended to be Asian/Muslim and were voting for an Asian Labour Candidate on that basis. That was their prime motivation. I won anyway so that’s OK!
In Yorkshire two things appear to have affected results, particularly where we were not in contention. Where Labour was mounting a strong challenge the Left vote, attracted by the presence of Corbyn, switched to Labour. Where resurgent Lib Dems were working we lost votes to the Lib Dems. Where we already held seats we did well, although we lost a seat in Kirklees to a Conservative. There is no clear pattern – non Tory votes were going from us to Labour or Lib Dems depending on where the advantage seemed to lie. In some areas where we are working for the first time such as Rotherham and Barnsley we did fairly well – a non-Labour option that was not UKIP.
The first point here is excellent. People will not accept drifting from principles because of short term electoral gain (if it even achieves that)
Point 2 is correct, and of course goes along with my analysis: we can appeal even more effectively to Con or LD voters, if we stop saying “We’re Left!” at every opportunity…
I guess that is done because it is an easy label does people understand and that broadly fits with our values and policies? ‘We’re social-liberal!’ would fit as well. ‘We’re Green!’ fits best but is not a label that many people easily understand and understand how it relates to their own political bearings.
In my view one solution would be to have more popular leaders, ‘We’re Green like Caroline/Pats/Sian” works as an easy label with everyone who has an idea what these three stand for…
Point 2 is correct, and of course goes along with my analysis: we can appeal even more effectively to Con or LD voters, if we stop saying “We’re Left!” at every opportunity.
Point 1 is a serious misrepresentation of my argument. ‘The centre-ground’ is a fiction resulting from excessive adherence to the crude left vs right dichotomy: the very dichotomy that I argued, in the piece, needs overcoming / supplementing!
Ecologism is a very start in a different direction.
This article doesn’t seem to have engaged with my critique of our positioning ourselves ‘on the Left’ (or ‘on the centre ground’, for that matter).
imo, the double-helix of environmental and social justice is the Green Party’s fundamental strength. It’s the essence of what our representatives should be doing yet, all too often, those elected seemingly govern for self-interest, or the interests of a sub-set of the whole, or the interests not of the people or planet at all, but of big-business.
Moreover, the Green Party oughtn’t to be looking at what’s vote-winning, but at what’s right. If other parties share those values, it doesn’t devalue the right-ness of the values, but rather it underscores the right-ness of them!
I don’t know why the Green Party went all weak at the knees when Mr. Corbyn was elected. To mis-quote that famous Tarzan sketch: “Your left leg, I like. I’ve got nothing against your left leg. Trouble is, neither have you.” The Green Party has a whole other tenet of thinking to Corbyn’s Labour, and is very different from the reality which is a persistent Blairite/Corbyn fractured Labour.
Two points regarding this analysis:
The seat we won in Dorset, Weymouth East, was from the Liberal Democrats, not the Conservatives. We also made two useful gains from the Conservatives in Essex, specifically in Epping Forest and Rochford.
In Bristol, although we made an overall loss in councillor numbers we gained three seats notionally to mitigate those losses to Labour (one from the Conservatives and two from the Liberal Democrats).